Application service delivery and application availability are two major challenges for maintenance projects for all service-based organizations across the IT industry. This is particularly true with regard to enterprise applications (which can include, without limitation, a number of applications and application suites from vendors such as SAP™, Oracle™, and others, such as enterprise resource planning applications, customer relationship management applications, accounting applications, supply chain management applications, and the like). These large-scale applications are mission-critical for many businesses, and any performance degradation, let alone application outages, can cost an enterprise millions of dollars. For example, one study found that 59% of Fortune 500 companies experience at least 1.6 hours of application downtime per week, which cost each organization around $46 million per year. Another study found that resolution time per application outage averages around 200 minutes. The average reported incident length was 90 minutes, resulting in an average cost per incident of approximately $505,500.
Given the dramatic cost of such application outages, IT organizations have invested heavily in developing monitoring tools around applications, networks, and hardware as preventive measure for application/service outages. The existing monitoring model, however, was designed based on old techniques and requirements, which are not sufficient to fulfill the modern demands arising from growing business environment and their customers.
In today's competitive business environment one cannot keep business critical applications and business services up and running with conventional monitoring tools/approaches that only alert an administrator to problems after performance has already begun to suffer. To prevent service degradations and outages, assure a high quality customer experience, and keep revenue flowing, recognition of the leading indicators of performance problems hours before they go out of control and lead to service outages is vital. Current solutions, however, do a poor job of such recognition. Such solutions generally rely on a monitoring system which alerts administrators to problems only after performance/service already has degraded and the application is approaching an outage situation.
Hence, there is a need for a more robust solution set of application service management. Ideally, such solutions would not only alert service delivery personnel well in advance of significant application impairment but could take automated corrective actions to resolve the problem/incident and prevent potential outages.